Top prize suspended

After being the biggest book award in the country for just a year, the Australia-Asia Literary Prize has been suspended. The Western Australia Arts Minister, John Day, said the $110,000 prizemoney, format and timing of the award were under review and he expected it to return in 2010. The previous Labor government established the award for Australian and Asian writers of books set primarily in Australia or Asia. The first went to David Malouf for The Complete Stories amid some complaint that none of the 12 finalists was from Western Australia. The shadow arts minister, Ben Wyatt, said the prize was likely to be a casualty of the government's spending cuts.